


Answered Prayers

by skidmo



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-20
Updated: 2011-11-20
Packaged: 2017-10-26 07:55:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/280620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skidmo/pseuds/skidmo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean doesn’t want to feel anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Answered Prayers

**Author's Note:**

> Written for LJ spn_teamfic’s round 2: Oscar Wilde quote: _When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers._

He doesn’t want to feel anymore. More than anything. More than taking another breath. More than never going back to hell. More than any other reward they could possibly offer him.

He just doesn’t want to feel.

He’s lived through the end. The end of everything; the fucking Apocalypse. Lucifer fucking walking the earth. And Lucifer had needed a vessel. And Sam…

Sam had been there with him in the chapel when Lucifer rose, and he’d have given anything to have switched places with his brother as the black smoke—somehow darker, thicker, more massive than any other demon they’ve seen—flowed into Sam’s body, through his eyes and nose and mouth and ears, and he’d had to watch as Sam’s eyes shifted to black and he cracked his neck slowly and fucking _smiled_ at Dean.

“Thank you,” ~~Sam~~ Lucifer had whispered, words like a caress, like the sweetest of temptations, and then he was gone.

***

He’d tried.

He and Castiel and Bobby…they’d tried everything they could think of, but it was too much.

For a year they’d tracked him, always just behind him. Three times they’d caught up to him, and every time it had come down to letting him go or killing Sam, and Dean just couldn’t do it.

***

Castiel had come to him one night, when the endless research and fruitless fighting had been too much and Dean had taken the Impala up into the mountains to get away for just one night.

Dean was sprawled out over the hood, looking up at the stars and wondering how they could still look so bright, so beautiful when all the world was falling apart around them, wondering what kind of God let people die all over the world but kept the stars alight to remind them of how peaceful their lives had once been.

(And it was a bloody, exhausting year. Dean got over his fear of flying when they had to follow Lucifer to Tibet, and he hadn’t felt clean since the first time he walked into a crowded town square to see half the population, mutilated and bled dry, strewn around the cobblestones.)

Castiel showed up with a rustle of invisible wings, as he always did, and Dean closed his eyes and sighed.

He said nothing, and Dean was grateful, because he knew what Castiel had to say, and he didn’t want to hear it. He simply laid there, next to Dean for several minutes until the wind began to chill Dean’s skin and he slid off the hood and got into the Impala, trusting Castiel would follow.

Castiel kept silent all the way down the mountain and as Dean got a room at the first crappy motel they came to.

They’ve done this before, of course. So much that it’s become almost automatic. Dean falls into a fugue, and Castiel finds him, holds him, warms him and wakes him in the only way he’s found that works.

And Dean clings to him, before, during, and after, missing Sam, missing peace, missing simple hunting trips chasing wendigo and ghosts and vampires, until he’s drained, spent, deeply sated, and he passes out, twined around and between and throughout Castiel, and he knows when he wakes he’ll be alone but at peace for a few days at least.

Only when he woke the next morning, he wasn’t alone. Castiel was there, frowning, looking at him intently.

“You know what you must do,” he said quietly, and Dean nodded, because he couldn’t trust himself to speak.

“It will not be easy.”

Dean wanted to roll his eyes, as though that wasn’t the understatement of a thousand lifetimes.

“I will be with you if you wish.”

He shakes his head. He has to do this, and he has to do it alone, and it’s taken him a year to get to a point where he could even begin to contemplate what he’s known all along he’d have to do. (Known, if he’s honest with himself, since he promised his dad he’d do what was necessary.)

Castiel nodded and sat up and was gone in an instant, and Dean was left alone.

***

He’d held Sam as he died, bleeding out slowly as Dean screamed for help, for anyone, any _thing_ that could stop it, keep him from having murdered his own brother. (And his father’s voice kept echoing in his ears, “Take care of Sammy, Dean. Keep him safe. Look out for your brother.”)

Before his last breath, Sam choked out a desperate, “Thank you,” and his eyes fluttered shut as his body went limp in Dean’s arms.

***

They’d asked him what he wanted as a reward, Zachariah smiling smugly, calling him a ‘good man,’ saying they knew he could do it.

They’d offered him anything he wanted, and he knew they wouldn’t give him Sammy back, and there was only one other option.

“I don’t want to feel.”

***

They don’t walk the earth in vessels anymore. They don’t need to. Earth has been remade, a perfect paradise, and there is no sin and no pain and no loss and no hearbreak. People go about their daily business feeling, if less pleasure than before, also less suffering. Desire and desperation and intense emotion of any kind are a distant memory, and humanity is content because it does not know how to be anything else.

And Dean Winchester, full of his Father’s Grace, watches and feels nothing.

 

 _fin_


End file.
